Topic: Prison Reform
Country: Haiti
Delegate Name: Skylar Van Dyke
School: Ann Arbor Community High School
Topic page: background guide and all position papers All Haiti position papers GLIMUN 2008 committees
Haiti’s understaffed, overcrowded, and insecure prisons are time bombs waiting to explode. Any spark of violence or mass prisoner escape could impede efforts by my government and the United Nations to combat gangs and other organized crime in Haiti.
Immediate needs are to ensure dangerous prisoners are placed in maximum security cells, increase numbers of guards to protect and ensure minimum care for prisoners, as well as fast track government and donor programs to build more secure prisons. Failure to respond with great urgency and resources to the global prison crisis not only would complicate police and justice reform but also add to national insecurity.
Haiti has less than 17 prisons that have to hold more than 5,500 prisoners. The National Prison in Port-Au-Prince is filled to 8 times capacity with 2,500 prisoners, with only 25 guards that can’t properly care for prisoners. Inside the system access to food is at a minimum and water is insufficient. 90% of inmates have some form of scabies or chronic itching, and the risk of TB is very high. Prisoners take turns sleeping or sitting and are granted walks to sanitation facilities only once a day for no more than 30 minutes. That is often the prisoners only chance to leave their cell. The national prison in a labyrinth of dormitories and yards, with crumbling walls provide inadequate security. Prisoners obsession with escape feeds on and drives the cycle of misery, humiliation and violence.
Countries need to fight impunity through comprehensive reform of the security and justice sector, including police, judiciary and prisons. Without adequate prisons the other reforms will not fall into place. Reforms that are required to keep the security sector strong are: keeping dangerous prisoners under sufficient security in strengthened portions of prisons while maximum security prisons are being built; modernize existing prisons and plan for and begin to expand prisons to reduce overcrowding: hold emergency donors meetings to establish a prison construction fund to meet all urgent prison construction needs and pledge towards long term prison reform requirements; give the new detention commission additional staff, advisers, computerized databases, and monitor efforts to identify prisoners who should be released on bail, unconditionally because no charges are pending, no trial has been held, they are not a threat to society or they have served
their time; and bring guards more rapidly into similar programs as police, as a human resource plan to recruit, train and staff prisons.
To satisfy Haiti’s prison requirements these measures must accompanied by construction of at least 1 max security prison in the short terms and at least 3 more in the long run to hold detainees in conditions that meet international standards. Beyond urgent construction, there is a need to hire and train more guards to staff prisons. Donors must become fully committed and engage in the design, training and financing of this critical aspect of rule of law.
Haiti has taken the first steps toward police and judicial reform, Both are challenges to the new Haitian government. But both will be even more difficult without the UN’s help to reform prisons across the globe.
